To receive industry-leading AI updates and exclusive content, sign up for our daily and weekly newsletters. Learn more
Business intelligence and data analytics tools like Tableau enable enterprise users to do so much more. Often the biggest challenge isn’t adding more functionality, it’s that users are staring at a blank page and not knowing what to do.
That’s the challenge Salesforce is trying to solve with the debut of Einstein Copilot for Tableau, which is being released in beta today. The new AI tool for Tableau is an extension of Salesforce’s broader portfolio effort, Einstein Copilot, which brings a set of generative AI capabilities to Salesforce applications. Einstein Copilot was available in public beta to Salesforce CRM users last month, providing users with a conversational assistant to help with workflows.
Einstein Copilot for Tableau is specifically tailored for data analysis and does more than just run natural language queries on your data. The new Copilot integrates a set of capabilities to help both business users and data analysts get past the dreaded “blank page” situation where they don’t know exactly what to do next or how to perform a particular action. Einstein Copilot for Tableau also integrates suggested questions that prompt users on what they can ask about a given data set. It also has conversational data exploration capabilities that help users dig deeper into the results.
Essentially, the goal is to provide business users with the tools to accelerate data insights without the hassle of learning to become a prompt engineer first.
“We’re not going to outright say to our users, you need to write better prompts,” Tableau’s chief product officer Southard Jones told VentureBeat, “so we’ve put a lot of effort and time into making sure that when an analyst asks a question in the traditional Tableau pill-and-shelf experience, they get a response or are guided to a very specific answer.”
In Tableau, pills represent the types of data you bring into your workflow, and shelves represent the columns and rows of data you want to analyze.
Einstein Copilot for Tableau screenshot provided by Salesforce
Einstein Copilot goes beyond Tableau Pulse
Integrating AI-powered tools into Tableau is not new.
Tableau introduced its AI-powered Pulse tool in February this year to help users uncover data insights and build data visualizations, after releasing multiple tools that enabled varying levels of natural language querying and AI-powered insights.
Einstein Copilot for Tableau is different because it is focused on acting as a true assistant to guide users through their data analysis and exploration activities.
“It’s actually recommending things on your behalf,” Southard says, “helping you build and run analytics and making sure users are comfortable using the interface.”
The interface is also driven by feedback, allowing users to decide whether the recommendations were helpful or if further improvements are needed. Southard highlighted that multiple user studies Tableau has conducted have found that being able to easily provide feedback about a feature makes people more likely to use it.
Guided calculation creation helps you prepare your data for analysis
In addition to data exploration, Tableau also offers data preparation capabilities as part of the core platform.
One of the most difficult things for new data analysts is often understanding how to create data calculations, and this is an area where Einstein Copilot for Tableau can help.
“When preparing data for analysis, you often do things like add columns and create calculations,” says Southard. “Like any tool, to create calculations in Tableau you might have to learn a language, which can be difficult to master. So we let you write it in human language and then translate that into machine language.”
gen Writing emails with AI is not the same as doing data analysis
Salesforce already has Einstein Copilot in its CRM, which uses the same core foundation to enable Tableau capabilities, but Southard emphasized that it’s trained and optimized for specific use cases.
With Salesforce CRM, all of your data is already stored and collected within Salesforce, so the context of your data is understood. With Tableau, the context of how your data is used is not just for CRM, but for any kind of data analysis.
“LLM has great capabilities, but you need to really understand the use case to respond appropriately to prompts and have a positive dialogue,” he says. “Writing an email is very different from having a service call conversation, which is very different from asking questions about random data.”
VB Daily
Stay up to date! Get the latest news every day by email
Thanks for subscribing! Check out other VB newsletters here.
An error occurred.
